Gingerbread Daleks!

Back when I was vegetarian, I bought one of these Dalek Cookie kits to simultaneously indulge my love of robots and my appetite for cookies. Thankfully I remembered to keep the dalek-shaped cookie cutter, and these lovely vegan gingerbread daleks are the result!

For the gingerbread itself, I used this recipe from Parsley Soup, which tasted great. And to finish them off, I used some little dots of white icing to be the daleks’ spheres. Lovely!

Now I’m on a mission to find some reasonably priced vegan chocolate chips to use instead of icing next time…

Nut & Blackeye Bean Burgers

These chunky, hearty burgers are based on the Hazelnut and Bean Burgers from Veg-World.com.

Ingredients
600g blackeye beans
400g tinned chopped tomatoes
150g wheatgerm
150g mixed chopped nuts (peanuts, walnuts, almonds)
150g smooth peanut butter
About 25g wholemeal breadcrumbs for coating

Makes 8 big burgers

Method

• Preheat oven to Gas Mark 5/375°
• Whizz the beans and tomatoes in a food processor until the mixture is fairly smooth
• Scrape the bean-tomato mixture into a big bowl
• Mix in the chopped nuts and peanut butter
• Add the wheatgerm a little at a time, until the mixture looks around the right consistency to shape into burgers
• Put the breadcrumbs in a bowl big enough that you’ll be able to fit one of your burgers in it
• Grab a small handful of burger mixture and roll it into a ball, then squish it down into a burger shape
• Roll the burger around in the breadcrumbs until it’s coated in them
• Put the burger on a greased baking tray
• When all the burgers are rolled and coated, bake them for 30-40mins (slightly less or more depending on how thick you made them)

Gorgeous! For me, the wheatgerm is what really makes these burgers special; I’ve tried the recipe before with less wheatgerm and with kidney beans instead of blackeye beans, but this variation is the best. The burgers are thick and satisfying, like a big hunk of granary bread – which is what we served them in, making this probably the most filling vegan meal I’ve had so far!

Mint Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Ingredients
75g flour
130g sugar
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
20g cocoa
100g mint chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Plamil)
50ml rapeseed/canola oil*
1 small banana, mashed
1/2 tsp vanilla essence

Makes about 20 cookies

Method

• Preheat the oven to 350°/Gas Mark 4.
• Mix the flour, sugar, bicarb, cocoa and chocolate chunks together in a bowl.
• In another bowl or a jug, mix the oil, vanilla and mashed banana together.
• Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff gradually.
• Shape the dough into little blobs or discs and put on a greased baking tray (they spread out quite a bit, so give them plenty of room).
• Bake for about 10-15mins depending on how big/thick your cookies are.
• Leave to cool on the baking tray for about 5mins, until they’re firm enough to pick up, then transfer to a cooling rack.

These were pretty nice, but the mint chocolate didn’t work as well with the chocolate cookie taste as I thought it would, so they were a little disappointing (especially compared to yesterday’s Sparkled Ginger Cookies). Nevertheless I’m planning on trying a similar recipe with orange-flavoured chocolate, or possibly Green & Black’s Maya Gold, next time I get the urge to make chocolate cookies.
 
 
 
* I actually used 125ml of oil, but something must have gone wrong with my conversions from the VegKC.com guidelines, since the dough ended up far too oily – so I’d advise starting off with a small amount like 50ml and just adding more gradually until you’ve got the right consistency.

Sparkled Ginger Cookies

These lovely cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance are so insanely sweet that you might need to run off afterwards to brush your teeth! Perfect for those days when only the richest, most syrupy confections will do. Not only do these taste great, they look pretty too – the sugar sparkles on the top of these cookies definitely appeal to my inner child.

I really like the fact that the basic ingredients for these are the kind you’ll probably have in your cupboards anyway once you’ve started baking (e.g. flour, sugar, oil, baking soda, soya milk – luckily for me I had golden syrup to substitute for the molasses in the recipe, and also had ground ginger in stock).

Next time I’m going to try using black treacle instead of golden syrup, and muscovado sugar instead of golden caster sugar, to see if I can get a slightly darker taste to it. Oh, and I’ll probably throw in some chopped glacé ginger, but then I add that to just about everything ginger-flavoured!

Nut & Date Balls

Yep, it’s dates again! These are based on a recipe from Vegan Campaigns, but I had to use substitutes for pretty much everything except the dates, so here’s my version in full:

Ingredients:
100g ground almonds
125g mixed chopped nuts (the cheap type from Morrisons, which is mostly peanuts with some walnuts and almonds)
200g dates
100g sultanas
A few teaspoons of each type of coating you want (I used cocoa, dessicated coconut and, prompted by a last minute whim, 3 crushed ginger biscuits with half a teaspoon of ground ginger mixed in)

(Makes about 40 balls.)

Method:

• Whizz the dates with some water in a food processor until they’re a fairly smooth mixture (I used about 200ml water, but the mixture was a bit thinner than I wanted, so 100ml would probably work better).
• Add the date purée to the nuts and sultanas, and mix up with a spoon/spatula.
• Put each of your ingredients for the coating (the coconut, cocoa, biscuit crumbs, or whatever else you’re using) in a little bowl.
• Pick up a little bit at a time of your date-nut-sultana mixture and roll it into a ball, then drop it in one of the coating bowls and roll it around until it’s covered in the stuff.
• Transfer the coated ball to a plate/tray, and when all of the mixture is rolled and coated, put the whole lot in the fridge until chilled (I left them for about an hour).

I found this process went easier once I’d got JC’s help, so I’d recommend having an extra pair of hands for the coating stage. (He did the rolling-it-into-a-ball and I did the coating, to prevent any of the cocoa/coconut/crumbs getting into the mixture bowl – but if you’re making them all with the same coating then cross-contamination wouldn’t be an issue.) It’s great fun to make if you don’t mind getting your hands messy, especially the coating part.

The coconut ones were nice, the cocoa ones not quite as good, and the ginger ones were gorgeous. So, next time I make them I’m going to experiment with different kinds of biscuit crumbs – particularly my favourite biscuit of all, the mighty Hobnob!

ETA: I’m happy to report that the nut & date balls taste even better after 24 hours in the fridge, especially the cocoa ones which taste much more chocolatey!

Sweet Potato Fries

These scrummy sweet potato fries/chips are also in Vegan with a Vengeance, like the Ginger Roasted Winter Vegetables I posted about last week, but I originally found the recipe on the Post Punk Kitchen website – and I’m really glad that this recipe is available for free online, since it’s so brilliantly simple and tasty.

I’m sure you’re supposed to serve these fries as a side dish with some green veggies or something nutritious like that, but I love them too much and tend to just have a big plate of fries along with some wholemeal bread and Pure soya spread. Not a very complex meal, but it’s lovely comfort food for cold winter days!

Favourite Quick Vegan Dinners: Chickpea Couscous

This is from a recipe I found on Cooking For Vegans, and I have to say it’s my favourite quick dinner these days. It’s really tasty considering how simple this meal is to make – it’s just oil, chilli, tinned tomatoes, chickpeas and couscous. And it’s fantastic! I have this at least once a week using big 400g tins of chickpeas and tomatoes, and also quite often for lunch, scaling it down with those little 200g tins.

I’d never used unflavoured couscous before trying this recipe, so now I’m on the lookout for other easy but tasty couscous-based meals…

Ginger Roasted Winter Vegetables

This meal is based on the Ginger Roasted Winter Vegetables from Vegan with a Vengeance, with a few substitutions.

Basically, it’s a couple of trays of chopped up potatoes, carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes and red onion, coated in a mixture of 2 tsp of ground ginger, about 8 tsp of olive oil, and 3 tsp of golden syrup. It took about an hour and a half on Gas Mark 4, but it was definitely worth the wait, especially the parsnips!

Coconut Date & Almond Squares

I love dates! When they’re moist, they taste like caramel, and when they’re dry and firm they taste like toffee! I could eat them every day, they’re my favourite dried fruit.

These lovely date squares are based on a recipe from The Nutritionista (with a few changes – I used dried dates without soaking them, and just put about 250ml of water in the food processor with them, since the dates I buy from Morrissons are the kind that are pre-moistened with veg oil. Also I added about 50g of flaked toasted almonds to the crust mixture, since I wanted to use them up).

They tasted great – more coconutty than I expected, very moist and delicately sweet. Definitely one I’ll make again!